In my Open source and business strategies post I mentioned that we have planned to only use open source software for managing our business processes. I teach at a business university who partners with SAP and therefore we offer courses on how to use that software. At the same time I work on projects with many small and middle-sized businesses that still use Excel or a simple database in Access to manage their customer relationships. Well, to tell the truth, there are still some business owners only using a small black book filled with addresses and notes. Many of these businesses are small family businesses and when I talk about CRM or ERP, they have no clue of what I’m talking about.

As a teacher I’ve learned to not assume people know what I mean, so I will start this post by shortly describing what ERP is and what type of software I need. ERP means Enterprise Resource Planning, and Wikipedia says ERP systems attempt to integrate all data and processes of an organization into a unified system. A typical ERP system will use multiple modules of computer software to help integrate what used to be stand alone applications into one integrated system. A key ingredient of most ERP systems is the use of a database to store data for the various system modules. ERP systems attempt to cover all basic functions of an enterprise, regardless of the organization’s business type.

Examples of modules in an ERP are: Manufacturing, Supply Chain, Financials, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Human Resources, Warehouse Management and Decision Support System.

Doesn’t matter what type of business you do, without a customer there will be no business. That means storing information of our customers will be the most important part. I don’t know yet for sure, but for now it looks like we will have both consumers and businesses as customers, so we need to be able to categorize our customers. And even though we are planning only a web based business, we haven’t ruled out a brick and mortal store. My sister owns a hair saloon and our products could easily be sold at her saloon.

With sales both in Europe and in US we need to be able to handle different currencies. We also need to be able to track sales in US and in Europe separately. I don’t know who will do the accounting yet, both me and my daughters have the proper education for taking care of the accounting in Finland, butwe have no knowledge of how to handle accounting in US.

There are a lot more we need to figure out before we decide which system to use, but these are to most important parts.

In a comment to my previous post Compiere was mentioned, I have already installed another open source system called OpenBravo. There are others I haven’t checked out yet, like Adempiere, ERP5, TinyERP, OFBiz, and Opentaps. There are probably even more systems than this. The Enterprise category on SourceForge returned 1772 projects out of which OpenBravo was the most active with ADempiere Bazaar on second place.

I was lucky enough to find a blog called Open Source ERP Guru with a lot of information about different ERP systems. I’m going to check the blog out before I decide which system to check next. I recommend everyone who’s out there looking for an ERP system to check out the blog too.

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!


This entry was posted on Friday, February 22nd, 2008 at 11:23 pm and is filed under Business, Open Source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.